anion, and
how ill her thin garments and slender figure were calculated to
suffer the downpour, which he only found consoling. He drew her into
the shelter of a doorway, signalled to a passing cab; and just then,
the light of an adjacent street lamp falling upon her face, he
realized for the first time in its sunken outline the progress of
her malady.

"I beg your pardon," he said gently; "I did not understand that you
were ill. You must tell me where you are lodging, and I will take
you back." Then, as though he anticipated her hesitation, a tribute
to her old ambiguity, become so useless, he added dryly: "You can
tell me your address; you have no reason to hide yourself now."

She glanced up at him furtively, shrinking back a little as though
she feared his irony.

"I live in Charlotte Street, No. --. But pray let me go alone, sir!
It will not be your way."

"I have rooms in Bloomsbury," he answered. "It will be entirely on
my way."

And the girl made no further protest, when he handed her into the
cab, an inconvenient four-wheeler which had responded to his signal,
and, after giving the driver the address which she had indicated,
took his place silently beside her. Perhaps something of Rainham's
own lethargy had infected her, after a scene so feverish; or perhaps
she could not but feel dimly, and in a manner not to be analysed,
how that, distant and apart as they two seemed, yet within the last
hour, by Rainham's action, between her life and his a subtile,
invisible chord had been stretched, so that the order of her going
might well rest with him.

She cast furtive glances at him from time to time as he sat back,
obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the
blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles
which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of
his intervention was wearing away--it seemed like a mad scene in a
theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal--her
primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring,
with bewilderment that was akin to terror, into the motives and
bearing of their joint conduct. It had seemed to her natural enough
then, as do the most grotesque of our sleeping visions when they are
passing; but now that she was awake, relieved from the coercion of
his eyes, she was roundly amazed at her own complicity in so
stupendous a fiction. What had he made her do? Why had he taken this
sin of anoth